WASHINGTON - Small satellites, once the realm of one-off low-budget science missions and undergraduate engineering classes, have come full circle with the growing realization among hard-pressed, high-end users that the little birds can do the big jobs, too. (Cubesat image: Raytheon)

After dueling foreign policy speeches before the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week, the U.S. presidential candidates unleashed their surrogates on Washington, where a discussion at the Brookings Institution underscored both candidates' inability to answer questions on defense spending.

Open-ended technology-development program collects data for future exploration

After years of little presidential attention during the last administration, aerospace and defense industry executives are now more in the loop with top Pentagon officials—but they don't feel any better. In the latest in a series of get-togethers, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and several CEOs and trade organization leaders sat down last week to discuss the so-called sequestration budget cuts that are set to take effect in January. But from reports of the meeting, neither side walked away with answers or reasons to feel less anxious.

Politics—not policy or technology—is proving to be the biggest obstacle to developing alternative-fuel programs for the military that could prove to be successful commercial energy alternatives, says Phyllis Cuttino, director of the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate. The Pentagon is employing and deploying ships and aircraft using sound technology for alternative energy, particularly biofuels, Cuttino says.

NASA is pressing to use everything from robots to Russians in an effort to stretch the crew time available on the U.S. side of the International Space Station for research. William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations, says he is “narrowing down” the list of candidates he will select as early as this week for the agency's Commercial Crew Integrated Capability effort, which will provide substantial seed money for at least three private efforts to deliver crews to the ISS as early as 2015.